There is small (by proportion, though fairly large in number) subculture of wooden puzzle enthusiasts. Really high quality, die-cut, wooden puzzles.
But of course each puzzle is reasonably expensive, and once it's assembled it's really just....well, a picture with a bunch of squiggly lines in it. Not that much to look at.
A natural for sharing. Enter the Hoefnagel Wooden Jigsaw Puzzle Club! You keep the puzzle for as long as you want. And puzzles are generally "returned" by mailing it to the the next user, not back to the central facility. And everyone can afford better and more varied puzzling!
A library of wooden jigsaw puzzles delivered by mail.
But if I could rent a real lift for (say) $44.95 an hour, and could schedule the time, I could get a lot more done very quickly. Oil change, tires, brakes; could do several things at once. Plus, the rental could come with a standard set of basic tools, which in the case of auto repair is both standard and quite specialized. Would need a way to check all the tools are there at the end, and are unbroken, but that should be possible if we can just use electronics to reduce (say it with me!) transaction costs.
Okay, the $44.95 is NOT HYPOTHETICAL! Anything I can imagine, some entrepreneur has already tried. That one is in Denver, by the way. A video, if you are interested:
Given the labor shortages plaguing many parts of the country, we might see apps/facilities that rent out auto lifts, commercial kitchens....what else, folks? The sky is the limit, if the sky were transaction costs.
CraigsList ad seeks a wedding escort for a future bride's mother-in-law, offering $1,000 for two days work.
Thead, titled "Wedding Date Wanted for Mother-in-Law," was posted on July 11 to the Hudson Valley Craigslist,Times Unionreported. The adsaidit was looking for someone available for an August wedding in Hudson Valley.
"She needs constant attention and supervision," the ad read. "She will probably wear white and try to escalate small dramas - your job is simply to distract and de-escalate. Flatter her for 2 days and make an easy $1,000."
I dunno. $1,000 is not much, for the set of skills and...well, "attention" that this might require.
Not putting too fine a point on it, but applicants MIGHT want to see a photo of the MiLaw in question, before a final price is negotiated.
Three weeks ago today, Sept. 5, I paid close attention to the St. Louis Cardinals baseball game against the Brewers. The Cards lost by giving up 5 runs, in stupid and inept fashion, in the 9th inning, blowing a 5-1 lead.
I announced that baseball season was (for me) OVER, and I would be ignoring the Cardinals and all of baseball from this point until Spring training, when pitchers and catchers report in February.
This promise I have kept, scrupulously.
My impression (I wouldn't actually KNOW, of course, because I'm ignoring baseball) that soon after I unplugged the Cardinals have won some games, and are playing better. Given that their winning percentage at the time I began to ignore them was 0.51, it is a simple binomial calculation to show that the chances of them winning (say, I don't know) 15 games in a row is less than .000001.
By any reasonable standard of inference, then, it is MY IGNORING OF THE CARDINALS that has produced any success (of which of course I am unaware, but have heard rumors).
So far so good. But I have a friend, a pathetic Reds fan (if that is not redundant, and of course it IS redundant), who has asked that I should ALSO ignore the Reds. He would be willing (I won't give his name, but his initials are Michael Martin) to pay a small amount for this service.
It struck me that this is quite a business opportunity. Rooting FOR a team is time-consuming; that's why I gave up on the Cards: it was taking a lot of time and sadness. But IGNORING a team is easy, and of course it SCALES. I could ignore MANY teams, with no additional cost.
But then I saw the problem in the reasoning: what if two teams I'm ignoring PLAY EACH OTHER. It would be the equivalent of "crossing the streams" in Ghostbusters. And that would be very, very bad. Egon said so.
So, sorry folks: ignoring the Cardinals is going to be my sole project for the rest of this year. I'm happy to accept bids to ignore YOUR team next year, once I have started watching the Cards again.
Taleb's argument is very plausible: If human behaviors are evolved, then the existence of certain patterns cannot actually be "irrational," though it may be atavistic).
As any reader of KPC knows, we often credit Tyler Cowen ("LeBron") for his occasional, but always insightful, series of posts on "Markets in Everything."
I have been accused of finding "Transaction Costs in Everything," so I might as well own that. My plan is to post at least weekly on this, and so have a collection of applications.
Prompted in part by this (accurate) comment from the LMM:
An example, then.
We had a piece of furniture, a bed frame actually, that we were going to throw away. But the LMM wondered if someone might want it. So she posted a "free, take it!" listing on NextDoor.
Within half an hour, two people had said they wanted it. Instead of sending it to the dump, it was now actually going to be used by someone who needed it.
I was very excited by this, and of course launched off into my rambling: "Do you know WHY this happened, why someone will now use something we were going to throw away?"
LMM: "Well, it's not because of you...." (It is barely possible, as all my coauthors know, that I sometimes take credit for things I did not actually do, I'll admit that. So her response was not out of line...)
MM: "Quite so. No, the answer is...." (LMM is staring at me, already mildly disgusted at the coming lengthy disquisition)
"transaction costs! Or rather the reduction in transaction costs. The small value of the thing we are giving away, an old bed frame, limits the amount of effort justified by finding someone who needs it. YOU would not have gone door to door, knocking and asking 'need a bed frame? need a bed frame?' But you didn't have to. Because the transaction costs on both sides, announcing the availability of the free thing and finding a willing taker for the free thing, were reduced by a platform, the bed frame went to a higher valued use instead of the dump! The online platform helped us make better use for a bed platform! It's a triumph of cooperation in the new sharing economy!"
SO many people just repeat the line about the US having the "most deaths from COVID," as evidence that Trump (but NOT the CDC, FDA, and other bureau-nebishes) "botched" the American "management" of the pandemic. For example, NPR's constant "America is the world leader in Coronavirus fatalities..."
I have some sympathy for that (except the absolving of the CDC, which was borderline criminally negligent; to be fair, NPR hammered the CDC) view. But it really does matter that the US is a very large country, with a large population. The more relevant consideration is deaths per 100,000, and by THAT measure the US is not even in the top 10 "most deaths."
Took the data from the Johns Hopkins database, and then deleted all the tiny countries with fewer than 10,000 total deaths (there were MANY countries that had very high death rates per capita, but only a few hundred deaths total, which seems to put TOO MUCH emphasis on the per capita thing...)
The resulting table, deaths per capita as of June 1, 2021, for countries with at least 10,000 total deaths, is reproduced below. And the results are interesting.
1. The US is not in the TOP TEN.
2. Countries with national health services, including the UK, Italy, and Belgium, have MORE deaths per capita than the US.
3. Sweden, which of course did the "no lockdowns" thing, has FAR fewer deaths per capita than the US. You can say Sweden had more deaths than Sweden WOULD have had, if they had locked down, but clearly locking down everything by force was not a panacea.
Anyway, if you want to say that the US health authorities got a lot of things wrong, and never acknowledged that they made this much worse than it should have been, I'm with you. But the US is not even close to the "most deaths" if you use a reasonable measure that controls for total population size.
As you may recall from my NY Times a piece a few years ago, one has to recognize that the regulatory problem is not just parametric optimization. In my example, the problem was that football helmets, which are actually quite good at protecting the head, result in MORE head injuries.
Interestingly, last year--2020--there were far fewer cars on the roads, because of social distancing, the shutdown of bars and restaurants, and the fact that many people did not commute to work at all.
The result: MORE TRAFFIC DEATHS. People drove much more aggressively on the nearly empty roads. To be fair, the total number of accidents did in fact fall by quite a bit, as you would expect. But the severity of the accidents that did happen? That was up sharply, especially outside of cities.
The point? Regulations have to take into account the likely response of citizens, based on expectations. You can't just twirl dials and pull levers when it comes to public policy.
Like old-school Netflix, but for puzzles 
Unlimited puzzles, keep puzzles as long as you want 
